Emulsion polymerization is an important method for producing synthetic resins, and it is also a predominant process for producing synthetic resins such as ABS resin, polyvinyl chloride, polytetrafluoroethylene, polyvinyl alcohol, polymethyl methacrylate and so on. Since water is used as medium to form emulsion during the emulsion polymerization process for producing resins, then the polymer is separated from water for further processing, the volume of the wastewater produced is large, the concentration of the pollutant therein is high, and wherein there are polymers with high concentration which are difficult to be degraded and polymer monomers with relatively high toxicity. Thus, it is very difficult to process the wastewater and the pollutant.
The wastewater from the emulsion polymerization process for producing resins mainly comes from the emulsion polymerization section and condensation and drying section wherein the polymer is separated from the emulsion. The wastewater of the emulsion polymerization section mainly comes from the latex filter cleaning wastewater and the reactor cleaning wastewater, wherein the main pollutants are latex, the particle size of latex is small, thus the separation is difficult. The wastewater of condensation and drying section (or “the condensation and drying process wastewater”) is usually an acidic wastewater with high temperature, which contains high content of dissolved pollutants and polymer powders with a relatively large particle size. The existing methods for processing the wastewater mostly comprise mixing the wastewater of different properties, followed by end-pipe treatment. However, these kinds of methods have many disadvantages, for example, high impact load, big processing difficulty, unstable effluent quality and high processing cost.